1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to workload migration, and more particularly to finding a best target configuration combination for migrating a workload into a cloud.
2. Description of the Related Art
A significant impediment to adopting cloud computing solutions is migrating existing workloads to the target cloud (or clouds). Because most clouds typically offer a limited combination of configurations, such as virtual machines, operating systems (OSes) and middleware software, not all workloads can be directly migrated to the target cloud in their original state. Servers in some workloads may have a combination of OSes, middleware, and applications that does not match any of the available combinations of cloud configurations. If those servers are to be migrated to the target cloud, they would need changes such as software upgrades, deletion, installation, or reinstallation to become compatible with at least one combination of configurations supported by the target cloud.
A workload server can potentially become compatible with multiple combinations of target cloud configurations by going through different changes. Existing tools to accomplish this enumerate each configuration combination, which becomes very inefficient as the number of different possible combinations increases.